A Case of the Stupids
What fear does to your thinking, and why it was never a character flaw
In this Substack post, Dr. Cantor looks at what fear does to your thinking. She begins on the night before her first day of medical school, when her body treated a lecture hall as an emergency and took her voice. From there she moves to a sugarcane field in Tamil Nadu, where the same farmers scored higher on a reasoning test after harvest than before it, and to the brain's energy budget, which explains why a frightened mind has less of itself to draw on.
"We are reading a shortage of fuel as a flaw in the child."
— Pamela Cantor, M.D.
Before deciding what someone's struggle says about them, she suggests asking what else their body is paying for right now.
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